Archive | March, 2010

Link: Value Object Class generator for ActionScript 3

by on 26th March, 2010 in ActionScript

A bit specialist perhaps, and the need for such a tool might become redundant if the Flash Builder hype is to be believed, but I found this quite useful for speeding up the process of writing a value-object class in AS3.

http://projects.stroep.nl/ValueObjectGenerator/

What is a value object anyway?

For the uninitiated, a value object class is essentially a class with very little or no application logic inside it.

Instead of being a file that actually does something, it’s more of a class for just storing data.  What makes it special is that AS3 classes are not all dynamic, so you have to plan what data you need to store and how you’ll store it; and you can achieve a vast majority of that with value object classes.

If you’re coming from an AS2 or Flash IDE background you might think it’s a bit unnecessary or even frustrating, but when you plug value object classes into a development environment like Flex Builder you see where it comes in useful, when it can actually gives you useful autocomplete suggestions, and warns you if you’re passing the wrong type of data into your classes.

Video link: Content-aware Fill in Photoshop CS5

by on 25th March, 2010 in Photoshop

It’s well over a year since CS4 came out and introduced some cool new content-aware transformation tools (see an earlier post about content-aware scaling in CS4) and with the release of CS5 it turns out we’ll have another awesome content-aware trick added to our toolkit.  Check this video out:

I just don’t know what to say; it’s totally awesome.

Link: Advanced image filters for Flash Player

by on 9th March, 2010 in Flash

These filters aren’t really going to visually blow your mind – I think they’re a little more on the techie or specific-use side of things, but that being said, they are very clever & pretty unique so they deserve a mention!

Image processing library for Flash Player: http://blog.joa-ebert.com/imageprocessing-library/
It’s a load of cool filters for images in Flash, including some of the more fancy image enhancement tricks that I can’t say I’ve seen anywhere else, like contrast correction, HDR filters, that sort of thing.

I find the best place to find out all of the gory details with this is in the ASDocs, which lists everything. [http://je2050.joa-ebert.com/imageprocessing/]. Now, on it’s own it might not seem that groundbreaking, but when you combine some of these effects creatively you get some interesting results.  Take the Normalize filter as an example; not much to look at on it’s own, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some blog somewhere talking about the Normalize filter being awesome for colour correction on photos.  And I’m sure every webcam image could probably use a helping hand from the BrightnessCorrection class or the GammaCorrection class.